


Corpses and Clues

by emma221b



Category: Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: 221B Baker Street, Case Fic, Gen, Maggots, Mortuary, Mystery, Refugees, Supernatural Elements
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-07
Updated: 2018-11-19
Packaged: 2019-06-06 21:26:05
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 17,324
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15203807
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/emma221b/pseuds/emma221b
Summary: With John away on honeymoon, Sherlock is looking for a case to occupy him. Any case. And when a new client tells him that dead people are talking to her, he discovers that science doesn't always provide all of the answers.





	1. Chapter 1

Sherlock Holmes lifted the edge of the net curtain to watch the girl oscillating on the pavement beneath. She was petite, with blonde hair twisted up in a neat chignon from which a single curl has escaped by her right ear. She was dressed fashionably but unremarkably in a black jacket, dark jeans and dark trainers and gave the appearance of someone who wanted to get lost in the crowd and remain anonymous.

Back and forth she went. A less scientific man would have imagine that all of those hesitating clients would wear a dip in the pavement outside his front step. As it was, he was well aware that it would take thousands of individuals centuries to do so. He was used to the dance of prospective clients. They would walk up to the step, raise their hand to ring the bell,and then when their finger was almost touching it, the hand would drop and they would walk away, only to double-back nine or ten feet down the street, hand raised again, finger closer to the bell each time until they got finally pressed it.

There was something different about this girl, though. She didn't have the poise of his normal clients. She was young, twenty four he estimated, possibly twenty five. She chewed the skin off the side of her fingers as she oscillated and it was that half forgotten habit that made him break with his tradition of non-engagement, push up the sash window and sticking his head out shout down, 'You could, come up you know. I don't bite - well at least, not often.'

She jumped at the sound of his voice, and looked up. 'I'm sorry, she said. I didn't mean to -'

'To what? To disturb me? You haven't. On the contrary, you might be about to make my day. Come on up.'

He walked over to press the unlock button on the entry buzzer and a few seconds later was rewarded by the sound of footsteps on the floor. Size four trainers, fifty-five kilos, no fifty-four he deduced as he went to open the door.

Three minutes later and the girl was installed on a chair. The chair. The client's chair. She was taller than he had initially thought, five foot three probably, but small framed with fine, even features and a button nose. Her dark blonde curls were pinned up in a messy chignon with a metal clip, but as he had noted previously, one curl kept escaping from the right hand side and she repeatedly pushed it back behind her ear in annoyance. John would find her attractive, Sherlock thought. His gauge for beauty. He found her not unpleasant to look at which was sufficient for him.

The girl had a quiet calm about her, despite her earlier jitters. Sherlock took up his own seat in the Eames chair, steepled his fingers and waited for her to begin to talk.

'I don't know where to begin,' she said, her eyes fixed on the skull on the fireplace as if seeking inspiration. Avoiding Sherlock's gaze or watching it for another reason.

Sherlock sniffed, catching an odd waft of a familiar scent. He closed his eyes to focus his senses, frowned, then got up, circled the girl, sniffing as he went. Trying not to invade her personal space. John has warned him about that.

'Is there something wrong?' she asked, looking puzzled rather than perturbed.

Sherlock's face broke into a grin as he worked it out. 'I presume you know Molly Hooper?' he said.

'Molly who?' the girl asked, turning round to look at him.

'Molly Hooper. I assume she works with you in the mortuary at Barts?'

'I don't work at Barts,' the girl said, as he circled round and resumed his seat. 'But how did you know about the mortuary?'

'Oh it's very simple really', he said, steeping his fingers again, speaking at rapid pace. You changed out of your scrubs but in your haste to get here you didn't shower. You still smell of the mortuary - sorry about that - it's an odd combination of disinfectant, embalming fluid and decaying human flesh that I'm sure you are familiar with. I presume you assisted with a post-mortem today, it's unlikely that your hair and skin would have absorbed that level of odour simply from working with refrigerated bodies in the mortuary. I suspect that at least one of the bodies that you worked on today was in an advanced state of decomposition. You left in a hurry, not so much of a hurry that you didn't take time to change out of your scrubs, but you were reluctant to remain in the mortuary long enough to shower. And you weren't looking where you were walking because you have a squashed maggot on the bottom of your shoe, presumably picked up as you walked out as I doubt those trainers are uniform compliant and nowhere near washable enough to perform messy post-mortems in.'

She stared at him, open mouthed for a good minute, then closed her mouth with a snap, narrowing her eyes suspiciously.

'How on earth did you know all of that?' she asked.

'I didn't know, I deduced it. It's what I do. So why don't you tell me what happened to bring you to my door at such a speed.'

'Do you mind if I get rid of the maggot first?' she asked, checking the bottom of one shoe and then the other. Pulling the offending object off with a tissue retrieved form her pocket, she asked, 'Can I put this in your bin? It's quite dead.'

'In the absence of a fish tank, that would seem very sensible,' he said. Indicating the kitchen with a tilt of his head his head.

She froze mid step, head whipping round. 'How the hell did you know about the fish tank?' She asked.

He sighed, 'Nearly every mortuary in the country has a fish tank in its relatives room,' he said with a dismissive wave of his hand. 'It is widely believed that the fish are relaxing. Besides they give the relatives something to focus on. Prevents those awkward silences. Decomposing bodies are common in mortuaries, and so unfortunately are the larvae from various flies. Mortuary technicians become fond of their fish and regard them as their pets. Owners enjoy treating their pets and what better to feed them with than a plump wriggling maggot or two, especially when they are present in such abundance after a post-mortem on a decomposing body?'

'APTs' the girl interjected.

'I'm sorry?'

'We're not called mortuary technicians, we're called APTs. Anatomical Pathology Technicians.'

'My apologies,' Sherlock said. 'So why don't you deposit your dead larvae unto the kitchen bin and tell me why you're here.'

'You mean you haven't deduced it yet?' she asked, after she had located the bin, placed the offending tissue in it, washed her hands at the kitchen sink with pomegranate scented fairy liquid (courtesy or Mrs Hudson) and returned to her seat.

'Enlighten me,' Sherlock said.

'Something happened,' she said.

'Well obviously.'

'Something - odd.'

'Define odd,' Sherlock said, starting to become interested.

'I was working in the fridge room,' she said. 'Checking tags at the end of the day. We do that - beginning of the shift and end of the shift, check that all of the bodies are tagged properly and that they're all present and correct on the list. Doesn't do to lose any of them or to have the labels fall off.'

'Heavens forfend,' Sherlock murmured, in a conscious parody of Mycroft. 'So what happened.'

'I heard someone talking,' the girl said. 'I thought someone was playing a trick on me. People do that. Especially to newbies. Hide on the racks and pretend to be corpses to make people jump, that sort of things. Everyone had gone home, you see. It was my turn to lock up.'

'But nobody was there?'

'No. I went outside and checked. I was the only one left in the department. But I could hear muttering. I even checked in the post-mortem room in case somebody had left a radio on, but there was nothing.

'So I went back into the fridge room and I could hear it - muttering. And then I listened closer and realized it wasn't muttering, it was praying.'

'Praying?'

'It was the Hail Mary, Mr Holmes. Somebody was saying the Hail Mary.'

He narrowed his eyes, considering. He was bored and wanted to be distracted, but nothing so far had grabbed him about this case. It was pivoting on a single question.

'In English or in Latin?'

'In Latin.'

And there it was, that spark that lit the flame, that jolted him out of his contemplation, that raised the case from a four to a seven. Maybe a seven and a half. That remained to be seen. Usually he wouldn't leave the flat for a seven but in absence of John, still absent on his honeymoon, a seven would do just fine.

He leant forward, hands resteepling 'And you're sure you were alone in the mortuary at the time?'

'Yes.'

'But you weren't, were you. In fact you were far from alone. You were in fact in a room with at least a dozen corpses in it.'

'Twenty seven ,' replied the girl automatically.

'Twenty seven?'

'We had twenty seven corpses in the fridge room today. One short of completely full. We thought we'd have to put up the pop-up racks but one got picked up by an undertaker.'

'So who were they?'

'Who were who?'

'The bodies in the mortuary.'

She shook her head 'I don't remember all of their names. I could probably tell you some of them.'

'No, not their names, that's irrelevant. I mean who were they. Were any of them Catholic? Was one of them a priest?'

'What - you believe it actually happened? You think a dead person could actually have been talking to me?' The girl's face made it clear that she had come here to be told that what she experienced was impossible. But if she really believed that, then why had she made the trip across London in such a hurry? So here then was a client who wanted to believe that they had imagined their experience, but for some reason knew that that they hadn't. The case had just hit a nine.

'What I believe is irrelevant,' Sherlock said with a sudden grin. 'What matters is that you believe it. Because if you didn't then you wouldn't be here. Come On!'

He stood up, grabbed his coat from behind the door, swung the door open and was halfway down the stairs before the girl had time to stand up from her chair.

To be continued...


	2. Chapter 2

'Where are we going?' the girl asked as Sherlock Holmes flagged down a taxi outside 221b.

'To your place of work, of course. Charing Cross Hospital, please,' he instructed the driver as he opened the door for the girl before walking round the car to climb in the other side.

They sat in silence as the taxi pulled off, and the girl turned to look out of the window, watching Baker Street Station speeding past, not wanting to give him the satisfaction of seeing how unsettled she was at being deduced like this. She wanted him to solve the mystery of the voice in the mortuary, not her. She didn't want anyone to try to deduce her.

She could feel him watching her, waiting her to turn back towards him, and for a moment she considered asking the cabbie to stop the taxi, getting out and just walking away. But she needed the answers too much. She needed to know that they're was a rational explanation for what she had heard. Because if the dead were really talking to her - she stopped herself mid thought, not wanting for a second to consider that as an option. After all who better to provide her with a rational explanation than the famous Sherlock Holmes?

She took a deep breath, then another, forced her hands to unclench from the fists they had curled into and turned away from the window to meet his intense blue-green eyes. His lips curled in a half smile, as if he had been aware of her silent discussion with herself, and was amused by it.

'What's your name?' he asked. And the calm in his voice was almost hypnotic. She wondered if this was how he discovered so much about people. By making them believe they could trust him.

'Amy ,' she said. 'Amy Connaghan.'

'Irish?' he asked, eyes narrowing slightly as if he was trying remember the origins of the name.

She shook her head, feeling calmer by the second. 'Not for several generations,' she told him. My great-grandparents came over here from Donnegal when my grandmother was five or six. We've all been London born and bred since then.'

'But still - Irish Catholic.' It was a statement and not a question.

'Originally, yes,' she agreed. 'I don't practice though. Not anymore.

'You mean you don't go to church,' he persisted. 'But you still believe - believe something. And that's why you not only recognised the Latin of the Hail Mary, it also meant something to you.'

He was deducing her again. Amy sighed, gritted her teeth and resisted the temptation to tell him to piss off and get out of her head. This was necessary, she told herself. It was all part of the process. And maybe he was right? Maybe there a reason that she had heard the man speak. Maybe it hadn't been a coincidence that she had been the one in the mortuary at that time. Maybe there was something in her that the speaker had recognised. Something that he had a connection to.

Or maybe she was going crazy. Or better still maybe she had imagined it. That was what she wanted him to tell her after all wasn't it? That it wasn't real? But if she believed that was possible then why go to Sherlock Holmes at all?

He was watching her, waiting her to speak.

She licked her her lips that were suddenly dry as a bone, before slowly saying, 'I don't believe - necessarily. I mean - I believe something. I just don't believe in the whole organised religion thing. But something bigger than we are. That's a comforting thing to believe in. Don't you think?'

'An all powerful paternalistic deity looking after us all? Not really, no. I prefer to believe in free will. But what I believe is irrelevant. What matters is why hearing those words unsettled you so much.'

She frowned. 'They're just so familiar I suppose. From my childhood. My grandmother used to take me to Latin mass sometimes. Usually late on a Saturday afternoon. After shopping. You know the one that's your get out of jail free card so you can have Sunday free? That was a Latin mass at her church. And I think she liked it. She always said there was something magical about hearing it in Latin. That it made her feel closer to God.'

'And what does it mean to you?'

Amy shrugged. ' I don't know, really. Childhood, I suppose. Safety. It always seems less scarey in Latin. I never liked the bit about death. But in Latin I didn't understand the made it easier.' A girl who worked in a mortuary who was afraid of death. The irony of that had never struck her before

She waited for him to stay something but he remained silent. 'Do you think that I imagined it?' she asked finally.

'No, I'm certain that you didn't,' he replied.

'So you think it was real?'

'I didn't say that.'

She frowned, confused. 'So did I hear it or didn't I?'

'That's irrelevant. What matters is that you believe that you heard it.'

She shook her head. 'You've lost me,' she said.

'It's very simple,' he told her, fixing her with those strange blue-green eyes again and speaking at lightening speed. 'Possibility A, your mind invented the whole thing. You imagined you heard the Hail Mary as a result of some inner turmoil resulting in religious discomfort, resulting in a Road to Damascus moment. Now no offense but you don't look like the religious zealot type. Am I wrong?'

'No,' she said, the word barely out of her mouth before he resumed his monologue.

'Making option A unlikely. Which brings us to Options B and C- that the Hail Mary was in fact real, but either transmitted locally from a recording device, or conducted through a pipe of similar from the hospital chapel.'

She shook her head. 'The hospital chapel is on the opposite side of the hospital.'

'Precisely, ' he' said, dismissing it with a wave of the hand. 'And what is more you heard it in Latin. Few priests still practice the Latin mass. Which makes it improbable if not impossible that the sound was transmitted. A recording device however remains an option. More of that later.'

'And option D?' She asked, the hairs rising on the back of her neck. Not wanting to hear what she knew was coming next.'

'Option D is that something in that room was reciting the Hail Mary.' he said, speaking more slowly now, and she could almost see his mind racking through the possibilities of this as he spoke. 'And as you were the only living person there, as far as you are aware, and that person was not you. That raises some very interesting questions don't you think?' he asked, watching Amy's face for her reaction as he did so.

'A ghost? You think that I heard a ghost?' Amy's reply came out as a squeak.

Sherlock shook his head every so slightly, 'Ghosts don't exist, Miss Connaghan. We both know that,' he said.

'Then I don't -' Amy started to say before she was interrupted again.

'No, not do I, but therein lies the fun don't you think?' he replied, with another sudden grin. She found his glee in the strange situation that she found herself in unsettling.

'How did you know where I worked?' she asked, keen to change the subject. To talk about something, anything, more normal than the fact that Sherlock Holmes, the man well known for his logic and scientific reasoning seemed to be toying with the possibility that she had actually heard a dead man talk to her.

'I didn't know, I deduced. Why do I have to keep telling you that?' There was a hint of irritation in his voice now. As if he was frustrated by her lack of understanding.

'But how?' she persisted. 'I could work at any number of hospitals in this area.'

'Not really,' he told her, obviously having resigned himself to her idiocy and the need to explain what was so obvious to him. 'You don't work at Bart's because you don't know Molly, and that pretty much excludes University College Hospital too because she does forensic post-Mortems there. You said there were twenty eight racks in your main mortuary fridge, which indicates a fairly large establishment, unlikely to be a smaller private hospital or a specialist hospital like Queens Square or Great Ormond Street.

'You said you stayed late to do the body count, and yet you arrived on my doorstep at twelve minutes after six, give or take a few minutes. Your colleagues would likely have worked until five, you were finishing the body count which takes what, twenty minutes?'

'More like twenty five' she told him.

'And you took time to change your clothes and presumably to lock up, which means at earliest you would have left the hospital at five thirty-two. You didn't arrive by taxi, you walked you the road, so you came by public transport, most likely the tube. It's a seven minute walk from the mortuary at Charing Cross to the tube platform, and an twenty-two minute tube ride here. It takes eight minutes to walk from the northern line platform at Baker Street station to here, which fits perfectly.

'You're missing two minutes,' she told him.

'The time taken to buy that bottle of water in your bag, I assume,' he said.

'It could have been from this morning,' she countered.

'It's still got condensation on it from the chiller cabinet,' he said, clearly enjoying himself.

'Are you ever wrong?' she asked, somewhere between irritated and intrigued. She had been told that Sherlock Holmes was difficult, had known that he as widely reputed to be a genius but the rapid change in his mood from calm, to irritated to gleeful she found perturbing in the extreme - but also rather intriguing. She found _him_ intriguing if she was being honest with herself. Because there was something of the outsider about him that she recognised from herself. Something lost and misplaced and _other._ Something that at the same time wanted to be admired and yet refused to conform.

'Rarely,' he replied, breaking through her train of thought, and then he turned to look out of the window, frowning slightly as if he was trying to work something through. Then he took out his phone and began to fire off a rapid series of texts.

Left to her own thoughts again, Amy found herself reciting the Hail Mary to herself, wondering if she could have imagined it after all:

_'Ave Maria, gratia plena,_

_Dominus tecum,_

_benedicta tu in mulieribus,_

_et benedictus fructus ventris tui, Jesus._

_Sancta Maria, Mater Dei,_

_ora pro nobis peccatoribus,_

_nunc et in hora mortis nostrae.._.'

 _'The hour of our death_.' What if there was something in that? What if she had heard the dead talking after all? What if one of the bodies, one of her charges knew that it was the hour of their death, or rather that it had been? What if that was what the prayer meant? What if what she needed was not Sherlock Holmes, but a priest?


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter probably isnt isn't for the squeamish - although if you've got this far, you've probably got reasonably strong stomachs. Fortunately neither Amy or Sherlock mind the odd maggot or two

Amy directed the taxi round the back of the hospital and let them in the back door, the one usually reserved for the ambulance crews bringing in the dead bodies, and the funeral directors coming to take them away again. The back door opened into the corridor which led to the freezer room on one side, and the isolation fridges on the other, kept as close as possible to fresh air for obvious reasons. They had post-mortemed a particularly ripe 'decomp' or decomposing body that morning, host to the maggot Sherlock had noticed on Amy's shoe earlier and the smell still lingered.

She glance across at Sherlock, seeing his nose twitch as he took in that odd aroma of decomposing flesh, gangrene and escaping gut contents. He didn't react to it though, simply shrugged off his coat, hung it on a nearby hook and turned round slowly in a circle, taking in the lay-out of the mortuary.

'Did you hear it in here?' he asked.

Amy shook her head. 'No, in the fridge room,' she told him.

He narrowed his eyes for a moment, then headed for the large double doors to his left, turning the massive metal door handle until the seal clunked. Pulling it open he waved Amy through ahead of him.

'Where did the voice come from,' he asked once they were inside, door left ajar. Amy always left the door ajar. It was one of her greatest fears, being locked in here. She used to have nightmares about it during her early days in the mortuary. Not because of the dead, you understand. She had no fear of those. Because of the cold. She never could hear being cold, and the thought of having to spend a night at minus five, dressed only in her mortuary scrubs terrified her. Her flat-mate Jemma, who loved her pop psychology, had suggested that she might be substituting her fear of the cold for fear of death itself, for being one of those bodies but Amy didn't think so. Death held no fear for her. The dead were simply emoty shells of what had gone before, she knew that. Which was what had made one of them talking to her even more perturbing. Because if the dead could talk, what else could they do? And if there was even a chance that even a small proportion of those cadavers that she performed post-mortems on were aware as she made her Y incision and systematically removed their organs ready for the pathologist to dissect, then what then?

'I - don't know,' she said, realising that Sherlock was watching her, waiting for her to speak. 'From over on the left hand side I think.'

'Show me where you were standing,' he said.

'In the corner, here,' she said, indicating with her hand.

'Go and stand there,' he said . And she hesitated for just a moment before doing as he instructed, aware that she had broken one of the golden rules - she had let somebody get between her and the door when she was alone in the mortuary. She didn't have her personal alarm with her, standard issue for lone workers out of hours, but this was Sherlock Holmes and she trusted him implicitly without knowing why. And Amy wasn't someone to who trust came easily.

'Here,' she said, when she had reached her spot in the far corner.

'And where did you the voice come from?'

'From the racks on the left,' she said, frowning as she tried to remember.

'Better get checking then'' he said, reaching to slide out the first of the racks nearest the door.

'Wait - check for what?' she asked.

'Well you called me here because you heard a cadaver talk to you. You and I both know that cadavers can't talk. Oh they can make noises,' he said, as she opened her mouth to protest,' You and I both know that. They burp and fart, they sigh and groan as waste gases escape. Sometimes they even move as gases shift and muscle groups relax from spasm, but they don't talk. They can't because talking requires a complex combination of muscle action in the throat and mouth that they are no longer capable of performing.

'Which means that if you heard speech from one of these racks there is one obvious possibility that needs excluding.

'That somebody isn't - dead?' she said slowly.

'Precisely,' he said, hand still poised on the rack. 'It's not as uncommon as you might think. Junior doctors get very little training in death and dying. They are often called to confirm death when the person is still warm. Respiration may be shallow, pulses may be so weak as to be impalpable, in the nervousness of inexperience they may fail to take the time to make the proper checks. There are numerous reports of individuals waking up in the mortuary several hours after death has been pronounced. The so called Lazarus phenomena when dead bodies come back to life is rare. Mistaking life for death is more common.'

'So what - you propose we check them all?'

'Well that depends. Was the voice you heard male or female?'

Amy frowned, considering, finding it odd that she has not thought about this before. 'I - don't know,' she said finally. 'They were so quiet. It was just a whisper really. I thought it was a man, but I suppose it could have been a woman.'

'Then we check each and every on - male and female,' he said, sliding out the first rack. 'And once we've determined they are in fact all dead, we check for wires, transmitters or any other kind of electrical device which could explain what you heard.'

'Okay, but not in those clothes,' Amy said, sliding the rack back in with determination. 'Some of those bodies have been there a while and are going off a bit. We'll need to change into scrubs just in case.'

'You think I care about my clothes when there's a case to solve?' he asked, a manic glimmer in his eyes.'

'Maybe not, but it's about infection control,' Amy told him, refusing to let go of the rack. 'No scrubs, no access to the bodies.'

'I don't think they care about cross infection,' Sherlock said solemnly reaching for the rack again.'

'Not of them - of you.' Amy said.

'Fine,' he sighed. 'Wouldn't want to break health and safety legislation when you've let an unauthorized individual into the mortuary out of hours would you?'

'All the more reason to have you looking like you belong,' she told him, then jumped as the phone in her pocket rang.

Number withheld. It was the hospital switchboard - she had almost forgotten that she was on-call. They patched her through to ambulance control who informed her they were on their way in with a patient declared at scene.

'How many body bags?' she asked suspiciously.

The call handler from the ambulance control had the grace to chuckle. 'Just the one, don't worry,' she said. 'Collapse at home today, wife with him at the time, family want to view at some point but we've told them not tonight.'

Amy felt her shoulders relaxed. She couldn't face another decomposing body tonight, not after everything else that had happened today. The three baggers were the worst. A bit like unwrapping a very strange sort of present, knowing that the contents wouldn't be anything that you wanted to see, and with the smell getting worse as each layer of wrapping was removed...

'Changing room this way?' Sherlock's voice broke her out of her reverie.

She nodded. 'Scrubs on the shelf' she told him. 'Steal some clogs that look closest to your size and go out through the 'Dirty' door and I'll meet you in the PM room.'

...

Amy briefly contemplated changing into scrubs before the paramedics arrived, but decided not to risk it. Instead she went to get the log book, the toe tags and the booking in forms. She checked the last empty rack was clean, and moved the lift to close to the ambulance doors. As if on cue the external doorbell rang and she opened it fast enough to make the paramedic jump. She grinned at him, and ushered them inside.

New arrival booked in, appropriately tagged and slid onto the rack, she went into the women's changing room, quickly threw on a set of scrubs from the shelf, slid her shoes into her crocs and walked into the post-mortem room. Sherlock was standing by the instrument rack, soup ladle in hand, looking slightly perplexed.

'For scooping out the fat. From bariatric patients,' she explained.

'I am aware of that - but why a ladle? Surely there is a more technical instrument?' he asked, without turning round, still turning the ladle round in his hands.

Amy shrugged, then realised that he couldnt see her. 'Sure,' she said, 'but thats cheaper.'

He turned round, and narrowed his eyes at her suspciously.

'NHS cutbacks,' she told him, trying not to smile at his expression. He looked rather dashing in his scrubs, she noticed, then turned her mind back to the subject at hand. She had more pressing issues than developing a crush on a private detective notorious for his disinterest in women. 'We're all watching our budgets,' she explained. 'Besides, that works fine, and its not as if our patients are going to complain.'

The corners of his mouth twitched up in the barest hint of a grin, then he carefully replaced the ladle on the rack and turned to the fridge doors. The mortuary was designed so that the main bank of fridges had two doors, one into the fridge room and one into the post-mortem room to enable bodies to be transferred from one to the other with minimum hassle.

'Here," she said, pulling two thick green aprons off the roll hanging on the wall and handing him one before slipping the other over her own head. 'And you'll need one of these too,' and she handed him a blue theatre cap, turning away slightly to shove her own escaping curls up into an identical one. Sherlock looked at the proferred hat in disdain. 'Is that really necessary?' he asked.

'Worried about your hairstyle?' she asked him. Trust me if you dont wear it your hair will smell of decomposing bodies for days. It doesnt shampoo out. The smell just - me, I'm speaking from experience.'

He sighed, with an eye roll her teenage cousin would have been proud of, and shoved his hair up into the cap. Amy suppressed a smile. Sherlock Holmes was nothing like she had expected. He was a strange mix of blistering intellect and sulky child that she found oddly endearing. Amy didnt generally like people, not really. She could be polite and compassionate with relatives viewing their deceased loved ones, she could turn the charm on and off when she had to, but she preferred the quiet company of the dead to that of her work colleagues. She didn't do meaningless chatter, she preferred spending her time with people she knew well and could talk to about things that mattered. It struck her that Sherlock Holmes wasn't one for polite conversation either.

Aprons, gloves and theatre hats all applied to Amy's satisfaction, she pulled out the first rack. They worked through the cadavers systematically, starting at the top right and working down the rack, then along to the next column and so on. Each body was pulled out on its tray and slid onto the rollers of the hydraulic lift, lowered down, pulled into the middle of the room and then they systematically examined it.

Fortunately the bodies were already stripped, covered only with a thin paper gown, so it was relatively simple to check them for wires and devices. Sherlock went over each one meticulously. Head to toe, front then back, searching for any thing that could have transmitted a noise but there was nothing.

'Where's your metal detector?' he asked as he completed his visual inspection of the first cadaver.

'How do you know we have one?'

He gave her that look again. The one that said that he was both exasperated by her stupidity and secretly pleased at being allowed to demonstrate his superior knowledge. 'Well of course you've got a metal detector,' he said. 'How on earth would you be able to search for pacemakers? Missed pacemakers explode during cremations. Damage the ovens. Extremely expensive and the hospital insurers wouldn't like to be held responsible.'

She sighed, and silently produced the metal detector wand from its crate on the high shelf above the scrub sink and handed it to him.

'Are you ever wrong?' She asked.

'Rarely,' he said, lips twisting up into a grin. 'And when I am I try not to admit it. Now shall we?'

But that body had no wires or metal devices attached. Nor did the next. Or the next. As the final fridge door closed with a sickening thud it was after three o'clock in the morning, and Amy had the sickening realisation that there might well not be an easy explanation for this. As if she hadn't known it already.

'So what next?' she asked lightly.

'There are still those ones to go,' he said, indicating the fridges at the end. The one with the lead door. The one that held the decomp.

'He's been post-mortemed,' Amy said quickly. 'There can't have been anything in there, we would have seen it.'

Sherlock narrowed his eyes. 'They might have seen it, but they wouldn't necessarily have noticed it,' he said. 'Not if they weren't looking.' Amy sighed, realising that he was right, and peeling off her gloves, reached for the masks, goggles and the industrial gloves and aprons. You"'ll need these, she told him throwing them to him one after another in quick succession. 'I'll go and get George.'

George was the hoover, the green one designed for wet things. The one that also worked for maggots. By the time they had finished Amy's eyes were watering despite the goggles and she felt desperately in need of another shower. Crawling around on the floor, hoovering up he maggots that crawled out of a liquefying body wasn't her idea of a fun night.

'Showers are in the changing room,' she told Sherlock as she gratefully slammed the door shot, peeled off her gloves and apron and went and stood by the window that she'd opened slightly in preparation. God, she hated decomps. She tried to treat them with respect, reminder herself that it wasn't their fault that they had died unloved and unmissed, that nobody had realised they were dead until the flat below became invaded by flies, but still. There was compassion and there was the human instinct to remove yourself from bad smells. Some APTs even tried using nose clips. Or put Vaseline under their nostrils but that just replaced the smell of rotting flesh with that of eucalyptus plus rotting flesh and was almost worst. Plus if you had a cold it cleared your sinuses and a blocked nose was a blessing in this job.

Ten minutes later, showered and changed and feeling distinctly more human despite her lack of sleep, Amy glanced at her watch as she strapped it back on. 5am. They had been there most of the night. Lucky it was Saturday and they wouldn't be interrupted by her colleagues coming into the office for an 8am start. And there were no post-mortems on Saturdays.

Amy pulled her damp hair into a knot on top of her head and walked out into the office to find Sherlock already sitting at her bosses computer, fingers moving so fast they were almost a blur.

'What are you doing?' she asked looking over his shoulder.

'Black, two sugars please,' he said, sounding distracted, fingers still typing on one window while he clicked between screens on what she recognised as the mortuary database.

'How on earth did you get into that?' she asked, ignoring his request.

'I used your password,' he said as if it was the most obvious thing in the world.

'How did you know my password?'

'It's not difficult to guess. People are predictable in these things. Pet names, children's names, or items that they see when looking for inspiration. In your case -'

'George the hoover,' Amy said, trying not to be impressed.

'Precisely,' Sherlock said. 'And a sequential number code based on your date of birth. Very predictable.'

'Well I'm sorry for failing to surprise you,' she replied, going from impressed to irritated in a split second. He seemed to have this effect on her.

'Oh don't be,' he said, without turning round. 'You'd be amazed at how easy it is to crack most people's passwords. Even my brothers. Now you offered me coffee?'

'No I didn't.'

'Ah but you were about to,' he said turning to her with what was obviously an attempt at a charming smile.

'Fine,' she said with a sigh, and retreated to the kitchen to put the kettle on and raid the biscuit barrel. She briefly consider slipping a stray maggot into his coffee just to see how he'd react. Although from what she'd learnt about Sherlock Holmes she doubted that he'd notice - or care.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Authors notes
> 
> George the hoover - this is a real thing. Like a Henry but green. Ironically I've just ordered a Harry for pet hair which is also green. But less good for maggots I suspect. Apparently you have to jump up and down on the bags of maggots to squash them before you put it in the clinical waste bin. Best bit of the job I'm told.
> 
> Three bag decomps - again a real thing, or at least multiple bags for decomposing bodies. Sorry about that. They do also have special fridges in mortuaries for these types of bodies. Carla Valentine is very enlightening on them in her book 'Past Mortems' which is well worth a read as is Michelle Williams 'Down Among The Dead Men'. Both contain lots of fascinating detail about working in mortuary's. Once you get past the ick factor they're both lovely thought provoking books.
> 
> Soup ladles - again a real thing. Lots of fat in bodies. Sorry about that.
> 
> Exploding pacemakers - pacemakers have to be removed in the mortuary and junior doctors have to sign that no pacemakers are in situ before a body goes to be cremated. Pacemakers can slip round into the most unusual places so APTs are very good at tracking them down. No idea if they have metal detectors or not although seems like a good idea so I used a little creative licence. Pacemakers really do explode in cremation ovens and apparently they cause a surprising amount of damage.


	4. Chapter 4

There is a calm to be found in the rhythm of the work. Scrolling though records, entering data onto spread sheets. The pleasant distraction of the search for pertinent information among all of the pages and pages of scanned notes.

The girl has fallen asleep at her desk. Dark blonde curls spill over her folded arms as she rests her head on them over the computer keyboard. He is aware that she may well be a part of this mystery and has accessed her medical notes in his search for background data but they are disappointingly uninformative; records of her uneventful birth, one admission for appendicitis when she was ten and an A&E attendance with a sprained knee at the age of seventeen. Her religion is documented as Catholic, her next of kin as her father. There is no mention of her mother in any of the records following her birth. Now that was interesting. A search through the registery of births and deaths and the local papers reveals nothing. It was as if Angelina Corcoran had simply ceased to exist.

Amy's address on her last attendance is easily tracked to a small semi-detatched house backing onto the canal at Chiswick. A Google Earth search shows that it has a small well-kept garden at the back, a low brick wall and a black metal gate at the front. Zoopla shows that it has three bedrooms and two reception rooms and was last sold in 1993, presumably to Amy's parents. Land registary reports confirm this. Her parents bought the house in 1993, when Amy was six months old and it was registered in both of their names until 2003 when Amy's mothers name disappeared from the records with no explanation that Sherlock can find in the limited time available to him.

A quick trail throughout Amy's Facebook page reveals that she posts and comments little. She has the normal spread of friends, several of whom she went to school with. She attended a standard comprehensive in Chiswick with good Ofsted reports, located within walking distance of her registered address. Her school friends mention her with affection but she rarely responds to their comments. Sherlock finds her 'tagged' in several pictures from school reunions, and notes that she is always to be found on the periphery of the photograph, never in the centre. She smiles for the camera but the expression suggests that she would rather be far away from all of these people, curled up on the sofa with a good book. She is always dressed appropriately for the occasion, but the colours and styles are quiet and unobtrusive. She wants to look the part without standing out from the crowd. Three years ago, a man began to appear in her Facebook pictures. Sherlock recognised him, although oddly he is never mentioned by name, and does not appear to have his own Facebook account. James Waterby-Scott, a merchant banker who had been involved in some insider dealing eighteen months previously. Sherlock had uncovered his involvement almost by mistake when it had crossed over with another case. The insider dealing had been part of a far bigger network of corruption. Another dragon slayed as Mycroft would say.

Amy had stopped appearing in the man's pictures six months or so before the scandal broke and Sherlock had no recollection of her from his search of the Docklands Penthouse that Waterby-Scott had inhabited before his fall from grace. He felt oddly relieved to conclude that it was unlikely that Amy had been aware of the man's criminal activities. Her police record is blameless which confirms his own analysis of her. She does not have an Instagram account and her Twitter account seems to be used mainly to check for disruptions in train times.

The picture he builds up is of a quiet girl who doesn't like to get involved and is happiest in her own company. She has a small group of friends, who familiarity allows her to be comfortable with. Her father appears in the odd family picture, together with two older women, both of which bear a strong family resemblance to Amy and both share her surname, as did her mother. Her father is not Corcorran but Wilson. Now there was an oddity; a family where the women kept the family name. Where it was passed down the female line like a matriachy, Curious. Flexing his fingers he turns to google for answers.

'How long was I asleep for?' Amy asked from behind him ten minutes later, making him jump. He tried to shut the laptop lid down before realising he was working on a desktop, and settled for hitting control B instead to blank the screen. Always important to play your cards close to your chest. Besides the reveal was part of the fun, and an individual's reaction to it often told you more than the data that you had uncovered.

'A couple of hours,' he told her. 'Fortunately short of the acute caffeine deficiency, I managed remarkably well in your absence.'

'Did you find anything?'

'Plenty,' he told her, retrieving the screen and his database, hitting print on his keyboard and heading for the printer in the corner to pull of several sheets and hand them to her.

'Three Catholics, but none in the area of the mortuary where you heard the voices. Several of unknown religion who warrant further investigation,' he told her.

'Because they could be Catholic?' she asked.

'Because unknown means they were likely sudden deaths. In the unlikely event that this really was somebody trying to communicate with you, that seems the most likely group of candidates.'

Amy stared at him, waiting for her brain to engage and wondering if she was still dreaming.

'You can't possibly believe that I really heard a ghost,' she said finally.

'When you have ruled out the impossible then what remains, however improbable must be the truth,' he murmured.

She shook her head. 'I don't understand,' she said.

'Oh but I think that you do,' he said, unblanking the screen and opening the minimised internet window to show her what he had discovered. Timing was always important. And there was nothing like revealing to people what they already knew but assumed that you didn't in order to gain the upper hand. People always told you more when you caught them off guard.

'The women in your family keep their name,' he said to her nonchalantly, as if it was far less important than he knew that it was. 'But not their original name. In the 14th century they changed it to Corcoran, but before that it was -'

'Kyteler,' Amy confirmed, staring at the screen in front of him. The woodcut of a woman that must be so familiar to her. And Sherlock felt slightly ashamed of himself - an unfamiliar feeling. This girl wasn't a murderer, she hadn't committed any crime. In some ways she was the victim in this situation. All of his research indicated that she was being pulled into something that she had probably spent most of her life trying to run away from.

'Exactly. A good Irish surname,' he said cheerfully. John would tell him that he ought to show people that he was on their side and that was how John did it. Sounded - chummy. As if he liked them. And Sherlock did like this girl. She had something about her, something that he recognised in himself. That odd combination of confidence and a sense of displacement. Here was somebody who didn't always like the hand that life had thrown at them but had learnt to make the most of it and be if not happy then at least strong in her own skin. She was who she was. She just didn't like people reminding her of it.

'Shall I continue or will you?' he asked.

'You,' she said, swallowing audibly. He chose not to turn to look at her, but if he had, he knew that she would be pale. From the corner of his eye he saw her brush that curl away from her face again, but she did not make any attempt to refasten the clip that had slipped out while she slept. That would come later.

'Any resident of the Kilkenny area would be familiar with the story of Alice Kyteler, ' he continued. ' She was of course the first person on record as being condemned for witchcraft in Ireland. Fortunately for her - and for you -she escaped to England, changed her name, and when her descendants returned years later nobody dared to confront them because they all assumed the rumours were true,'

'It's a load of rubbish,' Amy told him firmly, and when he swivelled his chair round to look at her there was the clip, fastening her hair back up, showing that she was back in charge . 'I thought you were meant to be a scientist Mr Holmes?' There was a bite to her words that didn't suit her.

'Science has more to do with this than you might think,' he said, ' So for example as a scientist I can tell you that from my brief review of the case, Alice Kyteler almost certainly poisoned her succession of rich husbands to obtain their money. As you quite correctly say, witchcraft had nothing to do with it. That was simply an easy way to condemn a woman back in that time, when knowledge of science was so poor that no other explanation has been found. It has been suggested that she did it with ergot, given the rather alarmingly descriptive hallucinations that her servant Petronella de Meath described at her own trial. Personally I suspect she went for the more subtle digitalis - derived from the common foxglove.'

'Amazing what you can get from Wikipedia isn't it?' Amy said dryly.

That stung. Sherlock was surprised that it stung. His time for research had been limited after all and he had been rather smug about making the connection. Fifty years after Alice Kyteler had fled Kilkenny, her grandson, Robert Outlaw had left the house to an unknown female relative called Alice Corcoran who had been living in Liverpool. The trade paths between Liverpool and Ireland were strong even back then. Alice was said to bear a strong resemblance to Robert Outlaw but would only ever say that she was a distant relative.

The legacy had caused an outcry. Women in 15th century Ireland could not inherit. But fortunately Alice Corcoran had a husband with her, and so the house was duly signed over to him. But not after a fair amount of scandal by all accounts. One of the joys of a place like Kilkenny was that families stayed put for centuries. The same names came up time and again in the Parish Ledgers and in the grave yard, making it easy to trace whole families through time. And local legends were passed down from mother to daughter and father to son and were written down by local historians. The Corocorans family history was also well documented on the website of the Trust who now owned Kyteler House.

'Well I'm glad that you agree that Alice Kyteler wasn't a witch,' Amy said with a sigh when he had finished. 'I thought I was going to have to find another detective, It's just one of those ridiculous Irish legends.'

'Well if course she wasn't a witch,' Sherlock said with a frown. 'Witches don't exist. That's not the point.'

'So what exactly is the point Mr Holmes?' Amy asked.

'The point is that you think that it's relevant. And that is why you came to me. Because the legends about your family have been passed down generation to generation. Mother to daughter. And because that is why all the women in your family keep their name. Because they believe that there is something to be gained from hanging onto it.'

'They were wise women, that's all,' Amy said. 'People went to them for advice because they respected what they had to say. They brewed herbal remedies and because of that they got it into their ridiculous heads that there was something mythical or supernatural about what they did.'

'And what do you think?' Sherlock asked, watching her face closely.

'I think that it's all bunkum, Mr Holmes,' Amy said firmly.

'Do you?' he asked. 'Because if you did, why were you so disturbed out by what you heard.'

Amy shook her head silently, staring at the floor. Sherlock wondered if she knew that he'd very posture of defeat, her convulsive swallowing spoke more than any words could.

'Because it wasn't the first time was it?' he asked.

'It - is not - possible.' she whispered.

'Whether it is possible or not, the fact remains that you believe it.'

'Do you believe it?' she asked, looking up at him. And she suddenly looked very lost, very young and very frightened.

'I believe facts, Miss Corcoran,' he told her. 'And knowledge is the best way to dispel fear.'

'So how do we gain knowledge?'

'We look at this from the another direction. You are obviously not a phoney and not trying to pretend something happened which didn't. Moreover it seems unlikely that you imagined it as you have no history of mental illness - I checked your medical records, sorry about that - and you do not appear to be delusional. Which leaves us with two possibilities. Either somebody is playing tricks on you for reasons which are unclear or somebody is trying to tell you something. I can find no evidence of a trick, no wires, no recording devices which leaves one possibility left to investigate.'

'Go on,' Amy said weakly,

'What I am proposing is that we assume the improbable. That somebody was trying to talk to you. If this hypothesis is correct then what would they be trying to achieve?'

'To - tell me something?' Amy asked.

'Try again,' Sherlock said.

'To ask me something.'

'Nearly.'

"To ask me to do something.'

'Precisely.'

'To ask me to do what?'

'You tell me. You were there. In that room. They talked to you. I don't believe that was a coincidence. They talked to you when you were alone. Why?'

'This is ridiculous,' Amy said.

'Perhaps, but my case, my rules. You have the answers. You're just choosing not to find them.'

Amy felt like crying. She was tired. She hadn't slept for over twenty four hours now and she still had another forty eight hours of her on-call to go. She didn't want to think about this. She'd spent her whole life trying not to think about this and now this bloody man was going to force her to consider things she really didn't want to believe could be possible were - possible.

'I don't have any answers,' she said heavily. 'If I did, then I wouldn't have come to you.'

And she turned and walked out. Just like that. Out of the mortuary, down the corridor to the ladies toilets at the far end. She stopped there and splashed her face with cold water, gripped the cool sides of the washbasin and stared at her reflection in the mirror. Cornflower blue eyes stared back at her. She looked tired, her freckles standing out even more clearly than normal against her pale face. Angrily she pulled the clip out of her hair, finger combed it into some semblance of order, then twisted it back up again. Then she splashed her face with more water, before turning with determination back down the corridor to the mortuary.

Sherlock Holmes was standing there, waiting for her as if he had known she was coming.

'What do you need me to do?'she asked.

He grinned at her. ' I thought you'd never ask,' he said, taking her by the shoulders and guiding her back towards the fridge room.

...

'Close your eyes,' Sherlock told Amy as he positioned her where she had been standing when this had all started, in the far corner of the fridge room.

'Why?' she asked, instantly suspicious.

'You remember everything that you experience,' he told her. 'The problem is finding a way to recall it. The storage process in the human mind is almost perfect, but it's accessing it that's the issue. External distractions make accessing it more difficult.'

Amy closed her eyes and waited. It was silent for a good three or four minutes. She could hear the quiet rumbling of the fan that cooled the room, and behind it the faint hum of the traffic on the main road. She could smell the familiar odour if the mortuary - decomposition and cleaning fluid overlaid by the lemon air freshener that their admin support team liked to spray round when it got a little high in the office. She waited and tried to concentrate on relaxing, feeling the breath enter and leave her body, feel her feet on the floor, the chill of the refrigerated air against her face. She waited and waited but nothing happened.

'What now?' she asked finally, not opening her eyes.

'Now you try to take yourself back to yesterday evening when you heard the voice,' Sherlock told her. Remember what you'd been doing that day, what you had for lunch, what your plans were for the evening, how you felt as you walked into this room. Try to remember exactly how you felt when you walked over into this corner. You don't have to tell me, just take yourslef back in your mind to that moment'

Amy was relieved he didn't ask her to tell him. She had spent the morning doing four post-mortems with Helena, one of the pathology registrars. They had been standard enough. One of the corpses had been bariatric which had brought its own challenges, one had been painfully thin, an elderly man who has given up on life after his wife had died two years previously.

She had spent the afternoon catching up on paperwork, booked out a couple of bodies to funeral directors, answered a few phone calls. Nothing too taxing.

She had been last to leave that evening. Checking that all the bodies were tagged and accounted for before she locked up for the night. She had left this corner until last, and then she had heard it. The voice, very low, very quiet. It had sounded like a man whispering to himself. An overheard prayer. A private moment. She focused, trying to remember the voice. What it had sounded like, any accent, any hint of who it had come from. The voice had sounded desperate with emotion, she remembered, it had been cracking, it had been -

'There was an accent, ' she said aloud, frowning to remember. 'Not one I recognised. Something - unusual.'

'Define unusual,' came the quiet reply.

'I mean it wasn't a regional accent. It was foreign, but not French or German, nothing normal. It was more exotic than that.'

'Have you heard anything like it before?' he asked.

'Maybe. It could have been - Middle-Eastern perhaps. But then wouldn't she have been speaking Arabic? Maybe it was Greek. They have an Orthodox Church don't they? That would make sense,' Amy said.

'Turkish?' Sherlock suggested.

'Perhaps. I don't think I've ever heard a Turkish accent. But why would a Catholic have a Turkish accent?'

'There are Catholics all over the world, Miss Corcoran. In Turkey, Syria, even in Iran's and Iraq. The Catholic Church spreads its wings wide. Now close your eyes again.'

Amy did as she told and concentrated, trying to remember. 'It could well have been middle eastern,' she said.

'Anything else you can tell me?' Sherlock asked.

Amy waited, hoping something would hit her but it didn't. She shook her head reluctantly.

'Nothing,' she said. 'Just the Ave Maria.'

Sherlock nodded, then pulled out his phone. Within seconds, Amy found herself listening to the Latin version of the Ave Maria in a variety of different accents. She narrowed it down to Arabic or Iraqi, but couldn't determine which country the accent came from.

Sherlock scanned through the list of names written on whiteboards at the end of each row. None of them sounded remotely Iraqi or Middle Eastern. There were Polish names, Greek ones, English ones, African ones, but nothing Middle Eastern.

'What about this man?' He asked, indicating the in the corner. 'Unknown, unknown.'

'Sad case,' Amy said. 'Found collapsed in the street with a head injury, his wallet was missing. We thought it was a violent death, but it turned out thathe'd died of a heart attack. Death was probably almost instantaneous. The muggers were just opportunistic in availing themselves of his possessions while pretending to be good samaritans. Happens all the time.'

'So no idea who he is?'

Amy shook her head. 'None,' she said. 'He doesn't match the description of anyone on the missing persons database, the police have checked, and he's got no real distinguishing marks, just the odd mole. His dental records don't match anyone known to be missing either.'

Sherlock felt that familiar click when the pieces of a case were fitting together. 'Any personal belongings?' he asked.

'They'll be on the rack in the store-room, she said.

'After you,' Sherlock said, holding the door to the fridge room open and gallantly waving her through.

….

The man's possessions were in a white carrier bag with the familiar black NHS logo on the side. Inside was a coat, a black padded anorak that looked as if it had seen better days; a pair of black lace up mens shoes, the toes scuffed and in need of a polish, the laces in need of replacing; a mid blue shirt with a checkered pattern on it and a pair of navy blue chinos.

Sherlock picked up and inspected each item of clothing, looking at the labels, checking the trouser pockets and finding only a crumpled receipt, even sniffing the clothing as if that might give him a clue.

'Syrian might be right from the spices,' he murmured.

The he picked up the coat, went through the large front pockets, finding several more receipts, twenty-seven pence in small change and a lighter but no cigarettes, presumably the thieves had taken those two as the coat smelt of cigarette smoke. Then when the pockets were empty, he held the coat at arm's lengths and shook it. Something jangled.

'Keys,' he said shortly. A quick examination of the coats lining enabled him to track them down. They must have fallen through a hole in one of the pockets, that was how they had been missed, and had nestled in the thick inner lining of the coat.

Amy practically ran back to the office for a pair of scissors. Sherlock sliced into the lining of the coat and out fell two keys on a simple metal keyring, and attached to the keyring was a cheap plastic fob with a picture inside it. A picture of two children, a boy and a girl.

Sherlock held the picture up to Amy in triumph. But her face did not reflect his glee at the discovery. Instead her face went as transparent as one of her patients, and he only just managed to reach her before her legs buckled and she slid to the floor.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Alice Kyteler is a real and fascinating historical figure. Her main crime seems to have been surviving four of her husbands, although admittedly the evidence for that she poisoned at least one of them is fairly convincing. The first person to be convicted of witchcraft in Ireland, and one of the first in Europe, she managed to escape to London the night before she was due to be burned at the stake and was never recaptured. Her maidservant Petronella de Meath was less fortunate, and was the first person in Ireland to be burnt at stake. A dubious claim to fame.
> 
> Kyteler House exists and is now an inn. The story of Alice's relatives returning to Kilkenny and continuing the family tradition is an invention. At least, as far as I know...
> 
> So the big question raised in this story is what would Sherlock Holmes do if he was faced with a case in which the only logical explanation was the improbable one. We know what happened at Baskerville, but what if the only possible explanation seemed to be the improbable one? What would he do then?


	5. Chapter 5

‘So who are they?’ Amy asked, a glass of water and several biscuits later when the blood had finally returned to her brain. She felt like an idiot for fainting. It was the sort of thing Victorian heroines did, not APTs who were used to blood and guts. If a decomposing body and a seething mass of blowfly larva didn't bother her enough to make her faint then why should a simple photograph?

Because the photograph had meant something to her - to him. And as she slid to the floor she had heard a man's voice with a familiar accent saying the single word, 'Yes.' But she wasn't going to tell Sherlock that. Not for all the tea in China - or more appropriately, for all the spices in Syria

Sherlock had used the time it had taken her to recover to resume his frantic clicking on the computer keyboard. The man had been found on Peckham High Street. Two of the receipts in his pocket were for cigarettes and newspapers purchased from a newsagent set a couple of streets back from the High Street, the other for groceries from the Tesco Metro.

'Newsagents always know their regulars,' Sherlock said. 'Come on!'

They took a taxi, a black cab. Amy was silent on the journey, trying to make sense of the events of the last twenty four hours. It had started as such a normal day, and now here she was, sharing a taxi with Sherlock Holmes for the second time and on her way to solve - what? A crime? A mystery? And what would it mean for her? For what she was?

She pushed the thought away. It wasn't about her now, it was about the children. Because she was as sure as she could be that that was what the man had been trying to tell her. He had been in the mortuary for eight days. The children in the picture were young, very young; one only a baby, the other little more than a toddler. If they had been on their own for eight days then what sort of state would they be in? Would they even be alive? She could only hope that the picture was a few years old and that the children were now old enough to look after themselves.

The taxi pulled up in front of the newsagent and Sherlock jumped out like a fox after rabbits. Amy followed more slowly, realising that he had left her to pay the fare. Somehow she doubted she would be able to claim this back on petty cash. She sighed and handed the cabby a twenty pound note.

She walked into the newsagent to find Sherlock already in animated conversation with the man behind the counter. She loitered by the door, feigning interest in the cans of drink in the cold cabinet, not wanting to interrupt them. The low murmur of their conversation was muffled further by the hum from the fridge but she found that she didn't care. This was what Sherlock Holmes did best after all, get information from people. She'd only get in the way.

A few minutes later he was striding back towards the door, a piece of paper in his hand.

'Just round the corner,' he said to her as they walked outside, waving it triumphantly. 'The newsagent knows him well. Nice Turkish man, he said.'

'Not Syrian then?' Amy asked, unable to resist a dig.

'Lots of crossover,' Sherlock said with a shrug. 'The spices he cooks with are predominantly Syrian. Perhaps that's where the children are from?'

Amy suppressed a smile. He always had to be right. She had realised that about him already and felt rather pleased at her own deduction.

Sherlock lead her down the round a few hundred yards then turned sharply right into a courtyard behind a betting shop, complete with industrial waste bin. He headed for a set of rickety metal stairs on the left hand side, taking them two at a time to reach the second floor flat above, then stood waiting for her at the top. Amy realised why; she was the one with the keys in her pocket.

She took the steps more slowly, heart thudding so hard she was surprised that Sherlock couldn't hear it. She swallowed hard, mouth suddenly dry, not wanting to think about what they might find behind that door. What if they were too late? What if the children were dead? Eight days was a long time for two children to go without food and water. She pushed the key into the door, almost hoping it wouldn't fit, but of course it did. She turned it slowly and walked inside.

There were no flies. She noticed that with relief. She had been to scenes with bodies in them before, when she had done the on scene part of her training to do forensic post-mortems. There were always flies, different species depending on the age of the body. This flat felt - expectant - as if it was waiting to reveal its secrets, but there were no flies. She put her hand flat in the glass of the front door before she opened it, feeing foolish but nevertheless knowing it was the right thing to do. There was fear behind it, something or someone waiting for her. She had hoped that it might be a pet - a dog, a cat, that that was the reason that she had to be there. But a dog would bark at the approach of intruders, a less faithful cat would mew for food. But here was only silence.

She turned to Sherlock who was standing behind her. He was watching her with a look on his face - analysing her, interpreting what she did, storing it all up no doubt for a later blistering deduction.

'We could stand here all day,' he said. 'Or we could see what's beyond that door'.

She pushed it open and found - silence. But not the silence that comes from a deserted building, the silence that comes from something trying very hard not to be found. It was a silence heavy with watchfulness.

She walked through the small kitchen. The lino floor was sticky and she was aware of her shoes sticking on a patch of liquid in front of the fridge. Sherlock bent down to inspect it, dipped his finger in it and sniffed it before pronouncing 'honey.'

A cupboard door was ajar, revealing an open box of cereal and a multi pack of long-life cartons of orange juice, half empty. On the small kitchen table were two plastic cups, and an open carton of orange juice. Sherlock had obviously seen in too and moved towards it. There was a pool of orange juice by one of the cups, still wet and a few centimetres of juice remaining in the bottom of the pink cup. Sherlock held his fingers to his lips indicating to Amy to be quiet and jerked his head towards the living room.

The television was on, turned down low. Cartoons were playing - dogs dressed up in police and fireman hats pranced across the screen.

'We're not here to hurt you. Your grandfather sent us,' Sherlock said in a low voice, but there was no reply.

On the low coffee table were two bowls of dry cereal. One green, one pink. Plastic bowls, the kind used by children. No milk, no spoons, just the bowls. Young children, fending for themselves. Amy felt hope leapt up within her, realising what it meant. They were alive. And they had been here recently.

Sherlock narrowed his eyes and scanned the room, checking behind the floor length curtains before heading out into the hall on the far side. He headed for a closed door at the far end, but Amy acting on instinct rather than logic turned to the door opposite the living room.

She pushed it open to reveal a room with a single mattress on the floor, and a cot in the corner. The duvet on the bed was crumpled in a heap and the cot bedding was dirty, with a yellowing pool of old vomit in the corner. The room smelt of neglect and ammonia. A person less used to the smell of the mortuary would have gagged. She walked to the window and opened the curtains and then hesitating slightly window itself. She stuck her head out for a moment, appreciating the clean air in her lungs and on her stinging eyes. Turning back to the room she saw the origin of the smell - an overflowing nappy bin in the corner, dirty wet wipes surrounding it. In the far corner was a heap of dirty children's clothing. She stood in the middle of the room, surveying the scene. Children, there had been children in here. She remembered the man on the mortuary tray. He had been in his early sixties, with graying hair and wrinkles on his face that spoke of a hard life. Why did he have children in his flat? What had he been doing with them? Were they family or something more unpleasant. She had read about children being brought into the country as human trafficking. To fulfil the desires of evil men. But then she thought back to the picture on the keyring. In they were the same children then it suggested that he cared about them. That they were family. If they were the same children of course, because there was no guarantee of that.

She checked the wardrobe - empty. A few forlorn children's dresses hanging up in the cupboard. An abandoned child's toy on the floor. She picked it up -it was a pink rabbit, obviously much loved, the ears worn bare by repeated stroking. She held it to her chest for a moment, hugging it tight and felt - something. A pull, a memory.

A noise behind her made her jump. Sherlock Holmes was standing in the doorway, watching her. Then his eyes narrowed and he turned to survey the room.

'Children,' he said. 'And here recently.'

'Still here?' Amy whispered? 'Almost certainly,' he said, holding out his hand for the rabbit.

The label on it was worn bare and held no clue as to its owner.

Sherlock walked round the room, picking up items, dropping the, down again. 'Two children at least, maybe more,' he said. 'Left behind, scavenging food from the cupboards as much as they could. One still in nappies, age about two judging from the size of the nappies, the other older. Probably the one who opened the cartons and found the food.'

He stood and did a slow three hundred and sixty turn, inspecting every angle of the room.

'So where are they?' Amy asked.

'Hiding,' Sherlock answered quietly. 'Just like they've been told to.'

Amy walked into the hall 'Hello?' she called. 'It's okay, we're not here to hurt you.'

But there was only silence.

Sherlock indicated the room next door with his head and Amy followed him in. Another bedroom, this one obviously the old mans. A double bed, neatly made; a bedside table with a stagnant glass of water and a bible on it. A chest of drawers with a can of deodorant and a rosary resting on top.

'So he was Catholic?' Amy asked.

'Of course he was Catholic,' Sherlock said, checking though the drawers. "How could he be anything else?" He pulled out a passport, opened it, threw it to Amy.

The old man looked more animated in life. He was 69, slightly older than she had thought. And he was Turkish as the newsagent had said.

A quick search around the room revealed little more of interest, no papers, no letters, and no children.

The only remaining room was a bathroom. Nondescript white suite. Toilet, washbasin, bath with shower over. No room for a child to hide.

Back into the hall and still no sign of them,. So where were they?

'Here,' Sherlock said, handing her back the rabbit when a full search of the flat had revealed nothing.

'They're not here,' Amy said, confused. 'Where did they go.'

'Of course they're here,' Sherlock said. 'They're very good at hiding. They've practised this. Time and again. They would have had a drill. A place to go, a place nobody would find them.

'Not even Sherlock Holmes?' Amy asked, her mouth twisting up slightly into a smile as she spoke. She was teasing him. Teasing Sherlock Holmes. Who would have thought it?

'Well of course I could find them,' he said. 'But then so could you.'

She tilted her head slightly and considered what he was saying to her. She stood up and walked slowly through the flat, opening cupboards, looking under beds and behind things. He knew where they were, she was sure of it, but he was letting her work it out. Why? To prove something? To himself or to her?

Ten minutes later she had exhausted all possibilities. 'I don't know where they are,' she said finally, standing back in the hallway.

'Maybe the rabbit does,' he said, nodding to the object still clutched in her hand.

She stared at him, then at the rabbit, realising what he meant. Then she stood, eyes closed, clutching the rabbit, then raising it to her face, holding it against her cheek as a child would, stroking its bare ears, smelling the scent of childhood on it - soap and tears. Innocence and nightmares. Hope and comfort.

Then she heard something, the tiniest noise, one child whispering to another. And she saw them in a flash, two children huddling together in the dark. Waiting, waiting.

She walked, still clutching the rabbit to the bathroom. Without hesitation she pulled out the bath panel and there, inside the cavity under the bath they were huddled two childre: a girl of five or six, dark haired and dark eyed, dressed in a dirty dress that might once have been pink, and a smaller child, a toddler, clutched against her.'

'I think this is yours,' Amy said, holding the rabbit out to the girl. She grabbed it and held it to her face, just as Amy had, the other arm still protectively around her little brother. A tear slid down her face and was quickly absorbed in the rabbits fur.

'It's okay,' Amy told her. 'We're here to help.'

The girl just clutched her brother tighter, flattening herself as far back in the cavity as she could go. Her brother muttered something to her and she spoke back to him sharply in a language that Amy couldn't understand.

'Syrian - of course,' Sherlock murmured from behind her. 'Hence the spices. He was cooking familiar food for them.'

'Baş e ku hûn ewle ne,' he said, coming forward and squatting down next to the children. His voice was low and kind. The voice of a man used to calming horses or other animals.

'Baş e' he repeated, and then indicating between him and Amy 'Em heval in. kalikê te şandin,'

He reached out a hand gently towards them, and the little girl took it and scrambled out, pulling her brother behind her.

Both children were filthy, their faces streaked with dust from under the bath.

Desperately wanting to bring some normality back to their lives, Amy reached for a flannel lying on the sink, soaked it in warm water and handed it to the girl. She noticed how she reached out and washed her brothers face and hands first before handing it back to Amy, who solemnly washed it out, then handed it back to her so that she could clean her own face also. She had obviously been responsible for the nappies since her grandfather had disappeared too.

Sherlock was murmuring to them in the same calm voice, still squatting down next to them to ensure he was their height. The girl was becoming more animated now, waving her hands around as she spoke. The little boy looks terrified, clinging to his sisters leg, thumb firmly in his mouth.

'What are their names?' Amy asked, wanting to find some way to connect with the little boy.

Another rapid round of conversation and he turned back to her.

'The girl is called Maya,' he said. 'She's five.' Her brother is Thoman, he's two.'

'Hello Maya,' Amy said, holding her hand out to the girl who shook it solemnly, then to her surprise ran to her and buried her face in Amy's legs. Amy automatically knelt down and the child climbed into her lap. Her brother hesitated for a few moments and then followed. Amy stretched her legs out in front of her and readjusted Maya, then cuddled the little boy into her lap.

Sherlock frowned slightly, as if wondering where this had come from. 'Lots of little nieces and nephews', Amy said with a grin. 'And too much time spent helping out at the church playgroup.'

'I though you said you weren't religious,' Sherlock said, fixing her with that piercing stare again.

'I'm not. My grandmother is a stalwart of the local church groups. Easier to go along with it than to argue with her.'

Sherlock nodded, considering her. Amy knew she was being deduced. Something caught her eye - a gold crucifix on a chain at Maya's throat. She stroked it gently. 'Pretty,' she told the little girl.

'Ji mêrê min' the little girl told her solemnly.

'From her mother,' Sherlock said softly.

'I guessed that,' Amy said. 'They're Catholic?'

'Of course,' Sherlock said. 'Why do you think I talked to them in Kurdish?'

'There are Kurdish Catholics?'

'And they are doubly persecuted for it.'

'Is that why they are here?'

'Their church was burnt down. Their mother was inside it. Their father sent them here to keep them is in the army, Maya says, so he had to stay and fight.'

'Alone? He sent them alone'

'They had a relative with them. Some kind of distant cousin by the sound of it, but they got split up.'

'And the old man?'

'Their grandfather. Their mother's father.'

'So what now?' Amy asked, looking up at Sherlock.

'Firavîn?' The girl asked hopefully.

Sherlock smiled. 'Maya suggests lunch,' he said.

'You speak English?' Amy asked the girl.

'Little' she replied. 'Paw Trol. Pep-pa peeg.'

Sherlock looked bemused. 'From the television,' Amy explained.

She stood up, taking each child by the hand as she did so.

'Come on then,' she told them. 'Television and lunch it is.'

In the end, Thoman sat on the sofa watching television, wrapped in a blanket, thumb firmly in his mouth while Maya helped Amy make lunch. She showed her where the baked beans were, in the can they hadn't been able to open even when she had climbed up on the counter to get to the cupboard they were kept in. She helped her get fish fingers and oven chips out of the freezer that she had not been strong enough to open. The children had obviously adapted quickly to British food.

Sherlock meanwhile was making phone calls. 'They'll be here in twenty minutes,' he told Amy. 'And they'll contact social services.'

'I know a family who might take them in,' Amy told him, as she followed tomato ketchup onto both children's plates. 'Foster carers I know, they live round the corner from my gran.'

'Catholic.' Sherlock said. It was a statement not a question. He did that a lot, Amy had noticed.

'I wasn't lying you,' Amy told him. 'I'm not Catholic, not anymore. I lost my faith years ago.'

'But it's not about faith,' Sherlock told her. 'It's about being part of something bigger than yourself.'

'Do you think that's why their grandfather talked to me?' Amy asked.

'He couldn't have talked to you though could he?' Sherlock replied. 'He's dead. I thought we'd already ascertained that.'

Amy opened her mouth to ask what he meant, more confused than ever but he had turned away from her, pulled up a chair to the tiny kitchen table and was asking the children questions in what she now knew to be Kurdish while absent mindedly stealing a fish finger from Thoman's plate. The little boy snatched it back before he could get it to his mouth and Sherlock smiled at him, then pointed at the window and took a chip off the boy's plate while he was distracted.

Amy smiled, watching them. This was a very different Sherlock Holmes. Which was the real one she wondered? The upright, closed off man in his flat; the animated one in scrubs, demanding coffee at 4am, or this one, gaining the children's trust and chatting to them while he pinched their chips?

She jumped as the doorbell rang, and then the flat was full of people - detectives, uniformed police officers, social workers. She sat on the sofa watching Peppa Pig, with a child on each side of her, wishing she could make this less confusing for them while Sherlock filled them all in.

'Is okay,' Maya told her solemnly as she hugged her goodbye several hours later. 'We safe here. England.'

And Amy knew she was right. She watched the children being bundled into a car - they would go to a specialist police centre for now. The same one they used for victims of child abuse. There they would have their stories checked and checked again, they would be examined by a doctor for signs of abuse or neglect. For signs of torture even. They would have their clothes bagged and taken away, just in case. They didn't seem like victims of trafficking but as Greg Lestrade, the greying haired detective told her, you couldn't be too careful. Eventually they would be taken to emergency foster care, but Maya was right. They were in England and they were safe.

'Did you tell them what had happened to their grandfather?' Amy asked Sherlock as they walked away from the tiny flat together.

'Maya knew.' He told her. 'She said that it was the only reason he wouldn't have come back for them.'

'She didn't seem upset,' Amy said.

'She is a child of war,' Sherlock told her. 'She has seen too many people die to cry every time.'

He waved down a taxi and offered her a lift. She declined, and yawning told him she'd take the tube home.

As his taxi pulled away she realised she still had a million questions to ask him, but Sherlock Holmes had the answers that he wanted and that was enough for him.

Her phone rang just as she got to the tube station. Of course it did. Another body coming in and she still had forty hours of her oncall to go. She sighed, and did a detour via the Starbucks stand on the concourse for a double expresso before heading through the ticket barriers to her train.

...

It was Inspector Greg Lestarde who contacted her on Monday, not Sherlock. They wanted a statement from her on how she had known about the children. The problem was that she didn't know what to say. How could she tell a police officer that she had heard a dead man recite a prayer, and that she had spent a night in the mortuary with Sherlock Holmes while they inspected every body in her care before finding the answers in a bag of lost clothing? How could she explain that?

She put down the phone in the mortuary office with a heavy click. The text alert on her mobile pinged almost immediately. A number she didn't recognise, 'A part truth is not a lie,' it said.

'Who is this?' She messaged back.

'SH'

'What do I tell them?'

'I told you - the truth.'

'Which part of it.'

'You found the picture of children on an identified man's key ring.

He had no known relatives. He couldnt be identified.

You called me to help as people do.

We tracked down his flat and found the children.'

'Simple as that?' Amy texted back.

'The truth but not the whole truth' he replied.

She hesitated for a moment before texting back 'So what is the truth?'

'Well I could tell you, but where would be the fun in that?'

Amy threw the phone on the desk in disgust.

'Everything okay?' Karen, her mortuary manager asked.

'Fine,' Amy said. 'The police just want to come and take a statement about what happened on Saturday with those kids, that's all.

'Good job that,' Dale, the ward clerk told her. 'You're turning into quite the detective, Amy.'

She hadn't told them the details, hadn't told them about Sherlock Holmes, just that she'd been worried about the picture and had done some investigating. And that was exactly what she would tell the police.

She was surprised when Greg Lestrade himself turned up. She showed him into the interview room.

'Thought it was best to come myself,' he said. 'Thing is, Amy, cases involving Sherlock can get a bit - tricky. We have to file a report, and as part of that report I need a statement from you. But when it comes into the finer details of how Sherlock works, sometimes its best to leave out the finer details if you get my point.'

'Like the sniffing?' Amy asked.

'And the hacking into databases he shouldn't be accessing, and a number of other things that aren't entirely legal. Yes,' Greg Lestrade said with a rueful smile that implied it was far from the first time that he had had to mop up after Sherlock Holmes

He pulled out an iPad, and confirmed Amy's full name, qualifications and job title. After that it was surprisingly simple. Amy stuck to the story she had agreed with Sherlock. She had tried to do her own investigating about the identity of the unknown man but had drawn a blank. She had called Sherlock Holmes after she found the keyring with the picture on the children on if. Sherlock had found the keys and the receipts and the rest was easy to explain.

It was the truth, but not all of the truth, and much of it was in the wrong order. Upside down and inside out and omitting the fact that she had heard a dead man talking to her, and it had saved two children's lives. And she still didn't have any idea how this had happened or what it meant. The only man who might be able to tell her that was Sherlock Holmes and for a reason known only to himself, he was refusing to give her any answers.

'Why does he do it?' she asked Lestrade bluntly.

'Do what?'

'Solve puzzles, fight crime, do whatever it is that he does.'

Lestrade shrugged. 'Who knows? I tried to work that one out, years ago. I'm still trying. Best answer I've come up with is because he can. And because he enjoys unravelling the threads, you know? Tying up all the loose ends. Nothing pisses him off more than not being able to come up with all the answers.'

That was what Amy kept brooding on as she travelled home on the tube that evening. Sherlock Holmes hated loose ends, and yet he had not been in touch since that day in the Peckham flat, the day they had found the children. She had thought that he understood that the case she wanted solved wasn't that of the man in the mortuary, it was hers. And if he hadn't understood that, then what kind of genius was he?

She had his number from his earlier text messages. It would have been so easy to just phone him and ask. It wouldn't have even required the usual social preamble. Even the brief time she had him with him had taught her that much. She could just phone up and ask him. Or she could go and ring the doorbell at 221b Baker Street and ask him face to face.

Not about the children, Lestrade had told her about them. They had given full statements about their long journey to England. From Syria they had travelled across the border into Turkey in the back of a lorry and from there down through Europe. They had been taken across the channel hidden in a false compartment in the back of a van. An easy trick, and one that Lestrade was going to let immigration know about. At Dover their grandfather had been waiting, to wrap them both up in his warm arms in a way that had made them feel safe for the first time since their mother died. Then the soft seats of the coach, luxurious after the hard metal floor of the van, and they had both slept until they reached London. One last taxi ride, and they had arrived at the flat in Peckham, and there they had remained for the three months since they had arrived, while their grandfather had tried to obtain passports for them.

Their grandfather turned out to be an asylum seeker himself, his chances of gaining permenant leave to remain looking hopeful given the persecution that he had suffered in Turkey because of his Catholic faith. A long drawn our campaign, which the authorities had been aware of, but done nothing to prevent. His testimony for his case made harrowing reading according to Lestrade. Their grandfather had no doubt been worried that the arrival of two children also applying for asylum might not be seen as a positive factor for his case. And besides, he had heard stories about what happened to asylum seekers who were children. He had told them to Maya. They were taken away, he had told her, put into children's homes, given to foster families to look after. If you wanted to keep them then you had to prove that they were yours and how could he? When they had had come to England with no papers, no passports, no birth certificates. And they were so young and they had already been through so much. He wouldn't risk having them taken from him. Better to do it the secret way, he told her. He would get them papers so they could stay in England. Passports that would prove that they were Turkish, just like him. And once they had proved that they were Turkish, well Turkey was practically in the European Union, far less threatening to the British Authorities than refugees from Syria. And they would be allowed to stay, and to go to school, and grow up happy and safe in London.

And so they had stayed hidden, stayed in the flat, their view of London limited to the squares of roof and sky that they could see from the windows, the ant-like people walking past the end of the alley. And they thought that England was populated by the brightly coloured cartoon characters that they saw on the television. And their grandfather told them that one day soon Maya would be able to go to school, and they would be able to go to the park and Thoman could go on the swing and even the slide if he wasn't too scared. but until then they had to be like quiet little mice so that the bad people didn't come and take them away from Bapîr, their grandfather. And then it was Bapîr who was taken away, and when he didn't come home, Maya knew that she had to stay quiet, and keep Thoman quiet, and if the bad people came then they would hide and wait for Bapîr to come home. Because he always did come home.

The children were with foster parents now, and the Syrian embassy was trying to find their father who was fighting with the Kurdish Militia. Their foster parents weren't Catholic, but Lestrade assured her that they were good people, that the children seemed happy and that Maya had told him with great delight about her new school and the library full of books with wonderful pictures in them.

So the mystery of the children was solved, but that wasn't the mystery that Amy had wanted Sherlock to solve. He had as good as told her that he had known that. What was it that he had said? 'Where would be the fun in that?' It wasn't meant to be fun. It was meant to be her life. And if he knew then why didnt he just tell her? Wasnt that what a consulting detective was meant to do? Tell you the answers? So why wouldnt he tell her the answer to her case?

She chewed on it for a week, then another. Turned it over and over in her mind like a stone she has found on the beach. She lost count of how many times she had hovered with her finger over his number, pressing the call button, then hanging up straight away. Not knowing what to say to him, how to ask him what she wasn't sure that she wanted to know.

She must have walked past the door to his flat half a dozen times, trying to find the courage to ring the bell. She needed answers, she had to have them and if Sherlock Holmes couldn't give them to her then who could?

Every day she told herself that today was the day. That she would ring on his doorbell, ask him to tell her what she knew. Ask him to tell her that there was a perfectly rational explanation for all of this. She wasn't going mad, and she certainly wasn't a witch.

But if there was a logical answer then why hadn't he just given it to her with that infuriating smirk of his?

If he knew, then why wouldn't he tell her?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For those of you not familiar with the delights of children's television, the children were of course watching Paw Patrol. A bizarre programme where puppies wear policeman, fireman and various other outfits and rescue people in vehicles very similar to those used in Thunderbirds and usually for a reward of sausages or similar. Best watched after alcohol.
> 
> Maya and Thoman are speaking Kurdish, as Sherlock correctly deduced.
> 
> 'Baş e ku hûn ewle ne' - 'It's okay you're safe'
> 
> 'Em heval in. kalikê te şandin' - 'We're friends, your grandfather sent us'.
> 
> There are Catholics in both Syria and Turkey, although numbers are small in both countries and there is a history of persecution of Catholics thtoughout that region, including the burning down of churches. We have all read about the refuge crisis and Maya and Thoman's journey is unfortunately not an uncommon story. They were the lucky ones - they survived it and got to England.
> 
> One more very short chapter to go, more of an epilogue really. But if you're after answers, then Sherlock Holmes might not be the man that Amy needs to talk to after all...


	6. Chapter 6

Epilogue - 6 weeks later

Amy stands, finger poised over the bell of 221b, not oscillating this time but waiting. Yet what she is waiting for she couldn't say. She finds herself torn between the desire to tell him what she has discovered, and the fear that he will dismiss it, dismiss her and instead rattle off an entirely logical explanation.

For once in her life, Amy doesn't want logic, not now. She feels as if she has spent her whole life waiting for these answers. Why should she risk Sherlock Holmes taking them away from her? He is a man of science after all. How could he possibly accept what she has to say, and why would he even want to hear it. She was just another client, she tells herself. Another girl with another case - and he solved that case so why would he want her there, back in his flat, telling him things that he couldn't even begin to believe.

She drops her hand and turns away, unaware of the figure watching her from the window, concealed in a darkened room. Out of the corner of her eye she sees the net curtain drop, turns back, frowns, convinces herself that she imagined it and walks away. She does not go back the way she came, towards Baker Street Tube station, but instead turns towards Regents Park, hoping that a walk will clear her head. She is not yet ready for the Tube with all of its crush and noise.

The street is almost deserted, oddly so. But then it is six o'clock. The office workers will be in the Tube on their way home, or in the pub drinking away the day. Families will be inside doing homework and childrens' tea. It is still too early for the night-time revellers who will be applying false eyelashes and several layers of make-up before setting out for their evenings of drinking and flirting their youth away. A man walking a small dog crosses at the pedestrian crossing onto her side of the road. The lights change as he is halfway across, the green man flashing, the warning signal from the box beeping, and he sprints the last few metres, the dog bounding along by his side.

They make a comical pair, and Amy finds herself smiling at the sight. The man is tall and slim, a little over six foot, with that very ambiguous multicultural look that could place him as anything from West Indian to Middle-Eastern, possibly with a bit of West African thrown in. His black hair is clipped short to his head, but she can tell that if it was allowed to grow it would do so in a fuzz that would stand straight up from his head without copious use of hair products. He looks like a man who keeps himself fit and has a bottle of two of aftershave in his bathroom cabinet and possibly the odd tub of moisturiser, but not like a man who would be prepared to spend prolonged amounts of time on his hair. He is casually dressed in jeans, trainers and a hooded sweatshirt with the logo of a popular brand on the sleeve, but something about the way he walks declares him to be more than he appears. He holds himself very upright without the slouch of the streets, and he walks with the swing of those used to walking long distances, although whether as a soldier or a policeman she cannot tell. Maybe Dean from the office was right. She would make a good detective.

Amy turns her eyes away from him as he passes her, aware that she has probably been staring. He gives her lopsided smile, as if he is aware of what she is thinking. He is almost past her when she becomes aware of a small yapping object, running repeatedly around her legs, trapping her within the circle of its lead.

'Toby!' the man says, bending down to pick up the dog who is still yapping at her and dropping the lead to the ground to enable Amy to unravel herself before she trips. She performs an awkward kind of dance to untangle her legs and tries to gather her thoughts. Because the dogs yapping has turned to a bark that is not a warning or a sign of aggression, as with most dogs, but more of a signal. It reminds Amy of a television programme that she saw a few weeks ago. About dogs at airports who were trained to sniff out drugs, or large quantities of bank notes. It is a bark that denotes something, but what she has no idea. She has the odd sensation of being seen, and her immediate impulse is to run away, but when she fnally untangles herself and hands the end of the lead back to the man, his eyes are kind and he is smiling in a way that is hard to fake. She notes that he is not unattractive and that close up he smells faintly of cocoa butter. She feels a little smug that she was right about the moisturiser and decides that she is getting rather good at this detective game.

'I'm sorry,' the man says, tapping the little dog who is still barking sharply on the nose. 'Enough, Toby, I get the message.' The dog abruptly goes silence, then gives a whimper and buries his head in the man's shoulder. He is rewarded by a small bone-shaped dog biscuit which temporarily silences him. "Good boy,' the man murmurs to him before turning back to Amy.

'I'd like to say that he's normally good, but that would be a blatant lie,' he tells her with a grin. 'But I really am very sorry that he tried to trip you up like that.

'It's fine,' Amy says, laughing at the dogs indignant expression and pushing a curl of hair back behind her ear. It lasts there for less than a second before bouncing free. She wonders why she bothers. The man puts the dog back down on the ground where he puts his head between his paws and lies staring at her, as if fixated.

'You should train him to hunt truffles or something,' she says. He looks as if he'd be good at it.'

'Well that's the strange thing,' the man said, his eyes narrowing slightly as he considers her in a way that reminds her uncomfortably of Sherlock. 'He already hunts something, and he seems to be convinced that he's found that thing in you. But that's not possible.'

'What do you mean?' Amy said.

'Well you see, Toby here is a ghost-hunting dog, and you, unless I'm less good at spotting ghosts than I think I am, are very much alive.'

He grinned at Amy, and any feeling of threat dissipated. 'Peter Grant,' he said, sticking out a hand, which she shakes hesitantly. There is a faint tingling as their skin connects, a sense of otherness. 'Its okay, I'm a police officer,' he tells her. 'Metropolitan Police, Special Ops - here' and he pulls out a warrant card and shows it to her.

Amy has the sense of being pulled even deeper down the rabbit hole. 'And you are?' he asks. She opens her mouth to tell him and sees the flicker of movement out of the corner of her eye. This time she sees the net curtain fall, and the distant sound of a violin begins.

As she begins what will be the first of many conversations with Peter Grant, they are serenaded by the sound of Beethoven's violin concerto drifting very quietly down Baker Street.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And so we'll leave Amy here with Peter - and Toby of course. I do wish I could be a fly on the wall for that conversation, but that might have to be a story for another day.
> 
> Peter Grant and Toby aren't mine - they belong to the fantastic Ben Aaronovitch and his Rivers of London series. If you havent read them yet then you're in for a treat.
> 
> As to what Amy is, what she's discovered, and whether she really heard a dead man speak to her, I'll leave that up to you and what you choose to believe.
> 
> I know what I think, and what Sherlock thinks. Lets not forget that ACD was a spiritualist who believed in fairies.
> 
> And you can never have too much magic in the world, can you?


End file.
